Feminist critics want to revise and discard a centuries-long predominance of male modes of thinking, characterised by scientific impartiality, cognitive methods and a hierarchical discourse of knowledge. However, this supposed objectivity and comprehensiveness of knowledge was constantly denying and dismissing  female experience and knowledge production. This fact gives feminist criticism a status of politically and activistically oriented theoretical discourse. 

There are different branches of feminist criticism which are based on psychoanalytical, marxist, poststructuralist, postcolonial, deconstructionist, cultural, queer theory, and there is also a division by a feminist theoretician Toril Moi. She gives a national tone to the feminist approach to literature and isolates the French feminist theory and Anglo-American feminist criticism. However, this division rather presents two intelectual traditions and is not too marked by the geographical or national determinants of the female authors who are representing them, because the French feminist theory also includes authors that belong to the English linguistic area and vice versa.

Anglo-American feminist criticism or gynocriticism (a term introduced by Elaine Showalter) is primarily interested in a sociological dimension of women's literature and the analysis of social construction of female gender roles. It studies female characters in (male) literary works, analyzes the notion of woman as a reader, explores the hidden tradition of female writing practice and introduces a gender-based approach to the reading of texts. Strongly emphasized is a criticism of existing social institutions, especially educational, and it strives to introduce into the educational canon female literary authors and theoreticians who would write a new history of literature, in which female names would join the literary classics. The most famous Anglo-American feminist critics are Kate Millet, Elaine Showalter, Susan Gubar, Sandra Gilbert, etc. The early phase is characterised by a strong antagonism towards theory, but with the French feminist theory entering the Anglo-American field, the situation changes and Anglo-American feminist critics become theoretically conscious.  

The French feminist literary theory explores the sexual difference in literary texts and language, emphasizing the specific women's writing as a reflection of sexual differentiation. Sexual difference is one of the basic terms used by the French feminist literary theory as a whole, which is largely influenced by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the poststructuralist theoreticians Roland Barthes  and Jacques Derrida. Due to this influence the entire French feminist theory, including the works of feminist literary theoreticians Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, is under the strong influence of psychoanalysis and philosophy of deconstruction. Unlike their Anglo-American colleagues, the French feminist theoreticians have developed a much wider theory, but the works of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray gained biggest importance in the field of linguistic explorations and the embodiment of linguistic difference in the text itself, which basically motivated the emergence of women's writing. 

Translated by Bilanda Ban